Jeffery Fraser

Jeffery is a Pittsburgh-​based freelance writer and frequent contributor to Pittsburgh Quarterly. In his past life, he was a reporter and editor for newpapers large and small, only one of which is still in business. His magazine and newspaper reporting has won numerous awards.

Of all of the thousands of students attending classes at the University of Pittsburgh last fall, Elsie Henderson was perhaps the most extraordinary. For starters, she didn’t walk the Oakland campus with an iPod fixed to her ears or consumed in cell phone conversation.

Eleanor Ott grew up in a family that encouraged her to pursue her passion in life. What that passion was didn’t become clear until after she left her Lawrence, Kan. home as a high school valedictorian with a college scholarship.

This fall, 23-​year-​old Katherine MacCord will begin her studies at England’s Cambridge University on the dime of Microsoft co-​founder and billionaire Bill Gates as the first University of Pittsburgh student to earn a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

In January, The Pennsylvania Board of Education’s Higher Education Council tossed out this idea for a new kind of institution of higher learning: A no-​frills, low-​cost college where kids could earn a bachelor’s degree sans the on-​campus fitness centers, climbing walls, as-​comfy-​as-​home dorm rooms and other expensive amenities found on many campuses today.

A few years ago, a model that University of Pittsburgh researchers use to help them assess local demographic trends suggested the day was coming. Last year brought further evidence that it, in fact, has arrived: southwestern Pennsylvania has finally turned the corner to become a place where more people arrive than leave.

Dawn was still hours away when Jim Rohr emerged from National City Corp. headquarters in downtown Cleveland on Oct. 24, 2008. The streets were empty, but familiar. His grandfather’s deli had stood just across the street.

Inside a red brick Victorian in Aspinwall, on computer hard drives and forms stacked high on the desks of the Tickets For Kids Foundation staff, opportunities are gathered daily that will transport the region’s neediest children to places never seen and worlds never experienced. The Grand Lobby of Heinz Hall. A summer camp…

1985 was a grim year for Pittsburgh. The region, reeling from a historic collapse of its industry, was hemorrhaging people, mostly young adults leaving for job opportunities that had evaporated in their hometown. The air was bad, worse than it is today. Even the beloved Steelers failed to offer solace, finishing with seven…

Rayfield Lucas had heard there were well-​paying jobs to be had in the shale gas industry; jobs that offered the opportunity to earn his way to a future more secure than the maintenance and warehouse work he’d done in the past could ever promise. He went for it.

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